


Bad Days

by igiveup101



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, i had an idea and it wouldn't get out of my head, i love sgu a lot but let's be real there was a lot that show introduced and then barely explored, i refuse to believe that what we see in the show is all there is to him i refuse, not least of all with scott
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:26:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4310469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igiveup101/pseuds/igiveup101
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has bad days. Matt doesn't see why he should be any exception.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad Days

Generally speaking, Lieutenant Matthew Scott was fine. In fact, considering his background and current situation, he was doing exceptionally. It didn’t matter that he had bad days; everybody had those. Sometimes they stretched out to bad weeks, or bad months, or once or twice even bad years, but those were rare occasions, and almost always completely manageable. He was a happy guy, really. It was just a rare few days off.

 

Some days he was just tired. Not in any major way, just in that getting up or going on missions seemed to require a lot more energy than he was sure he had. Those days, he’d rather stay in bed than do anything else, but he knew what his job was. It was to run whatever missions the Colonel asked him to, keep the peace, and try to make sure people were okay. So he dragged himself out of bed, fixed a kind smile on his face, and did his job.

 

There were other days he spent holding his breath and keeping his hands from fidgeting. Time crawled by on those days, as he waited for something to go terribly wrong- again- or for one of his friends to drop dead as part of whatever catastrophe was waiting for them that week. Matt had seen plenty of things go wrong before- car crashes, alcohol poisoning, shuttle crashes, alien abductions, getting stranded billions of lightyears across the universe, etc. And usually, he could deal with that. It was just that sometimes, waiting for the next inevitable disaster felt like watching a ticking time bomb count down.

 

Sometimes, he was simply angry. He was actually angry most of the time, at least on some level, but it was a rare occasion when it became slightly less manageable. He was rarely sure exactly who or what he was angry at- the Ancients, Stargate Command, God Himself, or something entirely different. Sometimes it was all of these things, and the entire crew of Destiny, and sometimes almost everyone he’d ever met. These were days filled with breathing deeply and counting to a hundred and reminding himself that none of these people had actually done anything to merit his anger. He wasn’t sure he should be trusted with a weapon on those days, but he’d never really done anything. Yet.

 

The days he didn’t know what to do with were the guilty ones. It wasn’t that he thought they shouldn’t happen; he had enough he should feel guilty about that he figured he was getting off easy. There was getting his parents killed on the way to his preschool, there was letting Father George rot away and drink himself to death, there was turning his back on the brotherhood, getting Annie pregnant, and leaving her to raise their child alone- sure, he hadn’t known, but what kind of excuse was that? It was just that these days he couldn’t find a plausible excuse for almost anything he’d ever done, which wouldn’t have really been a problem if it didn’t nearly paralyze him. What right did he have to go out there, knowing that anything he did could be the next big mistake, knowing that he’d let down nearly every single person out there at least once, or let someone they’d cared about die? Essentially none. So he stayed away from his shipmates when he could, focused on not messing up when he couldn’t. It was the least he could do.

 

Much easier to handle were the days that were just off. They didn’t happen very often, and they were usually just a result of not getting enough sleep, or of a particularly stressful few days. These were the least troublesome bad days, because they consisted mostly just of feeling out of it and ignoring the things he knew weren’t real. He’d had these days since he was a kid, so he’d learned how to tell the difference between what was really there and what wasn’t. When half of the latter category was dead anyway, it wasn’t a particularly difficult exercise.

 

The most common days were just the ones where he missed people. He missed his parents- what he could remember of them- and he missed the man who’d raised him, and he missed the son he’d never gotten to know. He even missed the people who were still there- he missed the Colonel Young who was sure of what he was doing; the TJ who wasn’t so sad even when she pretended she wasn’t; the Chloe from before the Nakai. They weren’t gone, not really, not physically, but they weren’t coming back, either.

  
But these were just bad days. Everyone had bad days, Matt knew that. They didn’t happen too often to handle, and they didn’t interfere with his job when they did happen. Matt just had bad days. Matt ignored them. Matt was fine.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a little weird. It's actually less of a fic than an expanded headcanon, actually. This actually took me forever to write because I didn't know what to do with it, and I don't have a beta, so that explains the quality (or lack thereof). Thanks for reading, though :)


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